Apr 1

-Allison Johnson, Apple’s vice president of worldwide marketing communications, is leaving the company for greener pastures, sources told John Paczkowski who broke the news on The Wall Street Journal’s Digital Daily blog. She played an important role in Apple’s worldwide advertising and reported directly to Steve Jobs, the man known for tight control of Apple’s marketing department.
No bad blood is brewing between Apple and Johnson as a result of her departure, sources said. The marketing whiz worked for the company since 2005, coming from Hewlett-Packard. Sources claim she’s leaving to start a new PR agency with Brandee Barker, a former Facebook PR person.

-Viber is one of the most successful free VoIP iPhone apps, and their 2.01 update is now available in the App Store. Viber earlier released 2.0, but they pulled it due to technical issues. The new releases brings the much anticipated feature of text messaging and some refinements.

-Marco Arment, has published an interesting blog post (as noted by Philip Elmer-DeWitt of Fortune) which points out that when Apple makes small hardware updates to their line-up, the changes hardly merit any attention. He concluded by the following.
While Apple needs to continue to make regular updates to its line of Macs and mobile devices to ensure market competitiveness (and dominance), the likelihood that Apple will soon switch to multi-year cycles to introduce significant updates to its devices is very high.  We can’t keep expecting them to release major new releases at exactly the same time every year and, if the iPhone 5 rumor is true, this may be a good illustration of this ‘new standard’.